Laryngomalacia – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Laryngomalacia in 18 board-style clinical cases with worked explanations. Each case gives you a clinical vignette, four options, the correct answer, and an explanation of why each of the other three is wrong, with the guideline or textbook it follows named on the answer.

Board-style teaching questions for paediatricians and trainees preparing for paediatric board, MRCPCH and licensing examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. Quiet on day one
2. Looking at the larynx
3. When it peaks and fades
4. Thriving and noisy
5. Quieter on his tummy
6. A runny nose
7. Why not asleep
8. Pauses at night
9. Looking further down
10. Arching after feeds
11. Low tone
12. An echo finding
13. What surgery achieves
14. Long, coughy bottles
15. Not what the letter says
16. The wrong operation
17. Going home on treatment
18. Why crying makes it worse

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Always audible from the first breath at delivery, Unchanged through childhood, fading near puberty, A contrast swallow and a chest radiograph, Supine for sleep; prone only while awake and watched, He has inhaled a small object and needs bronchoscopy, Anaesthesia alters laryngeal tone and the collapse, It detects seizures as the cause of the startles, Bronchoscopy shrinks the tissue above the cords, Supraglottoplasty now, before his growth is affected, Surgery succeeds less often than in other infants, Watch and wait, as he is still growing adequately, Most babies need a second operation within a year, Paced feeds with a slow-flow teat, held upright, Noise that is louder during feeding and crying.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Laryngomalacia arrives quietly: silent at delivery, noisy within a fortnight.
• Laryngomalacia lives above the cords: short folds, floppy arytenoids.
• Laryngomalacia gets louder before it gets quieter.
• A thriving noisy baby needs a plan, not an operation.
• Quieter on his front when awake; on his back when asleep.
• A cold turns up the volume of laryngomalacia; it does not change the diagnosis.

Work through the deck once for recognition, then again a week later to test yourself — each question gives the answer and explains why every other option fails.

More from this system: all Respiratory case decks · pediatric reference values.